Comfortable In His Own Ample Skin

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER WASHINGTON

The common image of a U.S. Secretary of State is that of Dean Acheson, Cyrus Vance, James Baker -- a suave Wasp lawyer, slender and urbane, who probably rowed at Yale or Princeton. But Lawrence Eagleburger, the new Acting Secretary, looks like the Michelin man with a cane. He once had an exercise bike fitted with a special rack so he could read diplomatic cables; it stood unused so long it was finally removed, and now he's ballooned to more than 250 lbs. He's had a knee-replacement operation, takes steroids for a muscle disorder, and has been spotted with a cigarette in one hand and an asthma inhaler in the other. "One," he bellows into the telephone, then hangs up. His secretary appears bearing a single cigarette from a pack imprisoned in her desk, which he lights with a silver lighter. He claims to have cut from three packs a day to less than half a pack; in the next 90 minutes he smokes three.

But as he takes on the biggest job of his 30 years as a career diplomat, Eagleburger, 62, somehow makes all this work to his advantage. "There is charisma in that funny penguin of a figure," says a veteran congressional aide. His devil-may-care attitude about how he treats his body extends to how he handles his public image, and at least in that regard the result has been astonishingly healthy.

That image is built with simple materials: intelligence and a bluff honesty. "I do not dissemble well," he says, a startling admission for a diplomat. He not only gets away with being direct, but people like him for it. "Many people in the State Department are quietly subversive about policies they don't like but obsequious to their elders and betters," says a longtime colleague. But Eagleburger has swum against that stream: never talking out of school, but glad to raise his voice within it.

Though he's careful enough to avoid saying things that could cause a diplomatic embarrassment, he can be winningly unvarnished. When sent to Capitol Hill to explain Washington's spineless policy toward Iraq prior to its invasion of Kuwait, he admitted, "I'm here to defend the policy. It didn't work. When you've got a policy that didn't work, it's not easy to defend." Says Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz: "He always conveys the impression that he's speaking bluntly and candidly, and that goes a long way."

The result is a lack of pretension rare in Washington, and especially so at Foggy Bottom. Eagleburger avoids using his formal office, with its chandelier, red damask couch and heroic picture of George Washington, because he thinks it looks too much "like a Moroccan house of ill repute." Says his wife Marlene: "He presents the same face to people in Washington that he does to our sons' friends. He's just comfortable in his own skin, and people respond to it."

A sense of humor has helped him as well. Each of his sons is named Lawrence, which he attributes to a combination of ego and a desire "to screw up the Social Security system." (Scott, Drew and Jason go by their middle names.) During his confirmation hearings, one Congressman was disgruntled about the way John Tower, the nominee for Defense Secretary, was being rejected partly because of charges of womanizing. Have you, asked the Congressman, "ever in public or private pinched a woman's behind?" Replied Eagleburger: "Can I divide that into two questions?" Asked by reporters how he planned to run the State Department now that Baker is gone, he deadpans, "Badly."

Every laugh he gets is goodwill in the bank. For a man who has climbed up the foreign service's slippery pole to the highest rank ever achieved by a career diplomat, who spent five years enforcing Henry Kissinger's notoriously impossible demands on the bureaucracy, who is regularly trotted out to testify on the stickiest topics, Eagleburger has remarkably few enemies in Washington.

His comfortable attitude stems in part from the fact that he is only the Acting Secretary -- plunged into the job when Baker left to salvage George Bush's White House and campaign -- and he is not expecting to get the job permanently. If Bush wins in November, Baker will probably come back to the State Department, and Eagleburger will gracefully and gratefully retire to his Virginia farm, where he likes to mow 10 acres of meadow and listen to opera. The same awaits if Bush loses. But there is always the possibility of becoming a semipermanent temp if Bush wins and decides to keep Baker as a domestic- policy czar for a while.

As Deputy Secretary for the past three years, Eagleburger has been able to satisfy Baker, a hard-driving pragmatist who can sniff divided loyalties at a hundred paces. He was a consummate No. 2, steadfast and discreet, who eagerly handled whatever Baker preferred to ignore or avoid. He oversaw messy subjects like aid to Eastern Europe, ran the bureaucracy, appeared before Congress when Baker sensed trouble, all without complaint. Though he never became part of Baker's innermost circle, he earned his boss's professional respect. "Eagleburger is the best deputy I ever had," Baker recently told some White House officials.

During the Gulf War, Eagleburger hustled to Israel and persuaded the Shamir government not to retaliate against Saddam's Scuds, a key element in holding the coalition together. His let's-have-a-drink-after-w ork relationship with key legislators was an important asset. "He is one of the few foreign-service officers who can enter into the spirit of the heavyweights on the Hill," says an old colleague. But he doesn't slap backs. "When Baker calls, it's for politics," says a Hill aide. "When Larry calls, it's for substance. That's his star quality up here: because people think of him as intellectual titanium, he makes members feel glad to be a member of his club, not that he's part of theirs."

Eagleburger was born into a Republican family in northern Wisconsin, spent two years in the Army after college, and considered going into Wisconsin politics until he gave up that notion because he was repelled by powerful Senator Joseph McCarthy. Instead, he decided to take the foreign-service exam when an advertising poster caught his eye. His wife calls him a "liberal Republican"; given the company he keeps, he prefers "moderate Republican."

His big break came in 1969 when he was tapped to be the personal aide to Kissinger, Richard Nixon's new National Security Adviser. Kissinger's demanding work habits took a toll: Eagleburger had a physical breakdown one day while Kissinger was throwing a tantrum, and he ended up departing for calmer duties in Brussels as a diplomat assigned to NATO. But he returned when Kissinger became Secretary of State in 1973 under Nixon and then Gerald Ford. By then he had learned to handle Kissinger, and he even gained a reputation as the only aide who could talk back bluntly to the Secretary. During one Middle East shuttle mission to Damascus, a muezzin's call to prayer, broadcast from a nearby mosque, awakened Kissinger at 4:30 a.m. shortly after he had completed a marathon meeting with Syrian President Hafez Assad. Bursting from his bedroom, he screamed that the muezzin had to be silenced. Eagleburger, says Kissinger, made "the officious moves of a foreign-service officer confronted by a demented Secretary of State"; the impolitic demand went undelivered.

In personality, Eagleburger was Kissinger's opposite: straightforward rather than clever, stolid rather than brilliant, a believer in channels rather than back channels. But philosophically, Eagleburger shared Kissinger's adherence to a "realist" rather than "idealist" approach to international relations. He considers stability and balances of power, rather than moral crusades, to be the best way to pursue America's true national interests. Like Bush, he was worried that pursuing a total victory over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War might create a destabilizing power vacuum in the region, and he was one of the envoys Bush sent to China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to help restore relations with the rulers in Beijing.

For five years before joining the Bush Administration, Eagleburger was president of Kissinger Associates, which provides firms with advice on international politics. It paid handsomely: in his final year he earned $1.1 million in salary and severance payments. But it also made him part of the old though not particularly venerable world of Washington consultants who cash in on their connections as well as their expertise as they revolve in and out of government.

While at Kissinger Associates, Eagleburger served on the board of the Yugoslav-owned LBS Bank, which was convicted of money laundering in 1988. About one-quarter of its business came from Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, whose Atlanta branch was instrumental in diverting U.S. agricultural loans to arms purchases by Saddam Hussein. Eagleburger has never been accused of any wrongdoing or even any knowledge of the banks' illegal practices, but Congressman Henry Gonzalez continues to pursue the theory that high officials in the Bush Administration have tried to cover up these activities. In addition, critics charge that Eagleburger's former financial connections to Yugoslav businesses made it awkward for him to become involved in U.S. policy toward the Balkans.

The breakup of Yugoslavia has been painful for Eagleburger, and a test of his philosophy. Seven of his 11 years abroad as a diplomat, four of them as ambassador under Jimmy Carter, were spent in Yugoslavia, where he earned the nickname "Larry of Macedonia." Soon after becoming Deputy Secretary in the Bush Administration in 1989, he warned that the end of the cold war could unleash ethnic hatreds in Europe, especially in Yugoslavia. He was criticized for having cold war nostalgia, but his fears have been justified. The U.S. mostly kept out of the mounting Yugoslav crisis until Baker visited Belgrade in June 1991, when the country was on the brink of dissolution. Baker and Eagleburger agreed that the federal government should be bolstered as the only force able to manage an orderly transition into freer statelets. But that government, which became a hollow creature of Serbian expansion, did nothing to stop the country's breakup.

In London last week for a conference on Yugoslavia, Eagleburger called for tighter sanctions against Serbia, more international monitoring of Serbia's borders and intensified relief efforts. He also pushed for the creation of a permanent negotiating mechanism in Geneva to slog through the messy details standing in the way of a Yugoslav settlement. All these things came to pass, and Eagleburger was pleased by the strong international unity demonstrated. But absent the use of U.S. military force, which he fears could lead to another Vietnam quagmire, none of these steps will guarantee a formula for changing Serb behavior soon, and he knows it. "To a degree I think we're in the midst of a Greek tragedy," he says, "which had a beginning, and somewhere will have an end, and a lot of people are going to die in the meantime. And it's awful."

That may be cold realism. But there are times when realism, a clear-sighted understanding of how things are, shades into fatalism, an assumption that they must stay that way. Eagleburger says he learned from Baker's Middle East diplomacy that persistence in a hopeless task can pay off. But the most interesting paradox about Eagleburger is that a man who is by nature an activist -- a lifelong problem solver who fills up a room with his presence and energy -- also insists that "there are sometimes problems," such as Yugoslavia, "for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution."

His wife notes that "Lawrence is not a worrier. If he thinks he can do something about a problem, he does. If he doesn't, he can compartmentalize it and come back to it." As she admits, "This isn't a completely terrific trait, but it mostly stands him in good stead." At the very least, it makes him suited for what he seems destined to be: a caretaker who will manage foreign policy for a few more months, allow Baker to supply any necessary strategic and political vision from his perch at the White House, and then step aside when the time comes for him to do so.